Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen

Building a mirror to the world

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Art Depot 

Together, we have the chance to build an Art Depot that holds a mirror to humanity and reveals to the world, for the first time ever, all the unseen beauty, care and passion that is held within our Museum.

Everyday the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum opens its doors and brings people face-to-face with kaleidoscopic collections, embracing everything from surrealist paintings to Old Masters, from every day practical objects to artistic expressions made to surprise, delight and challenge. 

In the quiet stillness of the Museum, today’s visitors experience carefully curated exhibits. The grandest art installation or the tiniest piece of pottery, every single item has the potential to enter our consciousness and hold us in a moment of rapture.  In that instant it talks to us, tells a story and transports us through time. One fleeting encounter can ignite our hidden desires and fire the collector within us all.

To collect is to be human. In fact, we are all collectors. Whether of books or bottles, photos or modern art, our collections are vivid, indelible reflections of who we are. To experience a collection as eclectic as ours is to see ourselves refracted through a different and revealing prism – perhaps for the first time.

This experience, this collection, this Museum could only have been created in Rotterdam through the passion and obsession of collectors like Frans Jacobs Otto Boijmans, Daniel George Van Beuningen and Willem van der Vorm. People who reflect the soul of Rotterdam. Hard working people with an innate drive to collect things of enduring beauty and meaning from around the world. Our city is, and always has been, a port that reaches out to the world; a confluence of trade, ideas, faiths and cultures; a melting pot of people who push boundaries, dare to be different and have a stubborn commitment to creating and sharing a positive, better future.

Because the current art depot is unsafe, unsuitable and unsustainable, we have both an urgent responsibility to safeguard the collection and a unique opportunity to create a transformative experience. One that brings together the treasures of the Museum, reveals the inner workings of the collection and gives people pure, unfiltered engagement with sublime work that has for too long remained hidden.

This is the idea behind the new Public Art Depot, the world’s first and only space built to allow uncurated access to an entire collection. Never before has a museum allowed people to go backstage, to peek behind the curtain and experience the care and detail and love that goes into the preservation of each piece for future generations.

We want people to enter our iconic new Depot, meet our experts and see the wondrous, magical, innovative work that goes into preserving, restoring, handling and transporting art and artifacts.

Nothing like this has ever been done before. There are no templates, no rules, no precedents. In true Rotterdam spirit, we are free to be pioneers – to create and curate our own vision. Through imaginative solutions, digitization and online technology we have the opportunity to do things differently, to connect with more people in more profound, moving and enduring ways.

The Depot will allow the light of public interest and personal curiosity to illuminate what were previously the dark recesses of a hidden, private storage facility. Creating a place that illuminates art through the brilliance of pure, undimmed experience. Each visitor will be free to explore or hunt. We can make our own unguided, serendipitous journeys of curation, finding works that speak to us, excite us, challenge us and hold a mirror to our true selves. A place where there are no themes or paths to follow, where we must ask questions of our own tastes, prejudices and motives. A place where we can forge connections with 800 years of artists and collectors.

In 2020, the new six story Depot building will open right next to the Museum. Designed by the Rotterdam architect Winy Maas, the Depot will reach as high as the Museum’s beacon and give all citizens of Rotterdam free access to a panorama of the city and its harbor from the rooftop garden.

One connected, integrated, symbiotic space designed to reveal art and the world of collecting in its multi-faceted dimensions. Together, the Museum and the Depot will be a powerful statement…..for the world, for Rotterdam and for the people of a city with a proud history of hard work, care and innovation.

With your support, we can make the Public Art Depot more than just a great building that stores wonderful collections. Much more. We can make it a transformative experience - a mirror to our souls, where visitors from near and far can see further, deeper and more clearly into what it is to be human. Into what it is to be makers and sharers, connectors and collectors of human stories.

Together, we can make it happen. We can reach out to the world and bring the world to Rotterdam. Revealing the beauty of our city, of our art and of us all.